


The Streets Run With Water

by Skairunner



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Altered Mental States, Murder, Natural Disasters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-05-28 06:04:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15042377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skairunner/pseuds/Skairunner
Summary: Black Kaze fights Leviathan, and what is left behind in its wake.





	The Streets Run With Water

**Author's Note:**

> Harbin and Moxcrunner gave valuable feedback. PCT inspired the snip.

_Sheets of water cast off casually, like a dog shaking rain from its fur, tearing through concrete and steel and those whom she loved._

She sloshed through the waist-high water and debris, raising her feet high enough that water poured from her soaked sneakers before she plunged them back into the murk. It was hopeless. They said this was how Kyushu would be, from now. That it would get worse, that it won’t get better. They said she needed to give up. She asked what would happen to those left behind. They said they would find a way.

_Help, a foreign cape gurgled in English, head barely held above the water, one arm sticking out like a semaphore without its twin. She shook her head and tried to move past, she needed to move up on Leviathan—Help, he repeated. Grabbed her leg. She struggled, but he had a strong grip._

She heard a child sobbing. It hurt to hear, just like it hurt to stand up, to keep moving, to keep _going_. She had a mission. She angled towards the sound, a quick slash of her knife enough to skip over a mangled wreck of barbed wire caressing a bicycle. Slash, and she felt her and the dozens of hers that were left behind in that instant, and then she was on a wall leaning sideways that didn’t seem able to get back up. She could see the boy through the glassless window. “Help,” the child said, weak, desperate, the angles of the word harsh and cutting. “Please—”

_The blood rolled off the blade of her katana as she slashed through the air. It was the right thing to do, but it still weighed heavily on her mind. Before she could fall, she teleported again—misjudged, slammed into concrete shoulder-first. Leviathan leered at her with its four eyes and before she could so much as catch her breath she was gone had to be gone **was** gone, water crushing the roof she’d been on, and people shouting as she caught her breath, more water pouring off the Endbringer with a deafening, distant roar—_

He was silent, now. She moved on.

_It was hopeless. They were fighting a living tsunami, each action malevolent and cruel and larger than any of them, and the waves could batter against the city forever until it fell, because it would. Leviathan cored Eiji and Serec’s mech and tossed it aside, even as it trampled a school and a mall. And the tide just kept rising. Just a little more, Legend shouted. A dozen died. “Go help move the injured to safety, Kaze,” Masamune told her. Apartments rubbled. “We don’t have enough people, healers, doctors,” a frazzled nurse said. Capes and civilians on gurneys spasmed under the black tags over their heads. The lucky ones did, at least. “We can’t save everyone. I’m sorry.”_

She mostly relied on her power to move. Her muscles burned, failing her, and only willpower kept her going. She had a mission, so she killed and killed and killed. It was better to be put out of misery now. She steadied, raising her knife at the window, and _swung_ —

The weight of her weapon disappeared as a metallic clatter rang through the room. Off-balance. The knife’s blade had snapped, became nothing more than a handle attached to a jagged, ugly shard of metal. This wouldn’t do. She let go of the hilt, slick with water and her own blood from her two burning-blistered hands—how long had she even used it for, a couple hours?—and looked around. The door? She made the motion, but she didn’t move. No blade. Fall more than stumble towards the door, rattle the knob, throw herself against it until it gave.

She didn’t bother brushing her sea-wet hair from her eyes as she opened drawers and dropped spoons and chopsticks and forks and shattered plates on the floor, and there were butter knives but that wouldn’t work. Her hands kept searching, her feet kept moving, and water soaked her feet and hung in the air as oppressive mist.

She grabbed the handle, pulling it out of the wood block. It sat in her hands differently to how the other knife had, heavier and more solid, weighted for cleaving. It would do.

She left the remains of the room behind, towards the next survivor.


End file.
